Island

"So you stuck to Bach and landscapes and the Clear Light of the Void."

"Which you wouldn't let me go on looking at," he complained.

"Because the Void won't do you much good unless you can see its light in Gongylus jjongyloides. And in people," she added. "Which is sometimes considerably more difficult."

"Difficult?" He thought of the marching columns, of the bodies in the mirror, of all those other bodies face downwards in the mud, and shook his head. "It's impossible."

"No, not impossible," she insisted. "Sunyata implies karuna. The Void is light; but it's also compassion. Greedy contempla-tives want to possess themselves of the light without bothering about compassion. Merely good people try to be compassionate and refuse to bother about the light. As usual, it's a question of making the best of both worlds. And now," she added, "it's time for you to open your eyes and see what a human being really

looks like."

The fingertips moved up from his eyelids to his forehead, moved out to the temples, moved down to the cheeks, to the corners of the jaw. An instant later he felt their touch on his own fingers, and she was holding his two hands in hers.

Will opened his eyes and, for the first time since he had taken the moksha-medicine, found himself looking her squarely

in the face.

"Dear God," he whispered at last.

Susila laughed. "Is it as bad as the bloodsucker?" she asked.

But this was not a joking matter. Will shook his head impatiently and went on looking. The eye sockets were mysterious with shadow and, except for a little crescent of illumination on the cheekbone, so was all the right side of her face. The left side glowed with a living, golden radiance-preternaturally bright, but with a brightness that was neither the vulgar and sinister glare of darkness visible nor yet that blissful incandescence revealed, in the far-off dawn of his eternity, behind his closed lids and, when he had opened his eyes, in the book-jewels, the compositions of the mystical Cubists, the transfigured landscape. What he was seeing now was the paradox of opposites indissol-ubly wedded, of light shining out of darkness, of darkness at the very heart of light.

"It isn't the sun," he said at last, "and it isn't Chartres. Nor the infernal bargain basement, thank God. It's all of them together, and you're recognizably you, and I'm recognizably me-though, needless to say, we're both completely different. You and me by Rembrandt, but Rembrandt about five thousand times more so." He was silent for a moment; then, nodding his head in confirmation of what he had just said, "Yes, that's it," he went on. "Sun into Chartres, and then stained-glass windows into bargain basement. And the bargain basement is also the torture chamber, the concentration camp, the charnel house with Christmas-tree decorations. And now the bargain basement goes into reverse, picks up Chartres and a slice of the sun, and backs out into this-into you and me by Rembrandt. Does that make any sense to you?"

"All the sense in the world," she assured him. But Will was too busy looking at her to be able to pay much attention to what she was saying. "You're so incredibly beautiful," he said at last. "But it wouldn't matter if you were incredibly ugly; you'd still be a Rembrandt-but-five-thousand-times-more -so. Beautiful, beautiful," he repeated. "And yet I don't want to sleep with you. No, that isn't true. I would like to sleep with you. Very much indeed. But it won't make any difference if I never do. I shall go on loving you-loving you in the way one's supposed to love people if one's a Christian. Love," he repeated, "love. It's another of those dirty words. 'In love,' 'make love'- those are all right. But plain 'love'-that's an obscenity I couldn't pronounce. But now, now . . ." He smiled and shook his head. "Believe it or not, now I can understand what it means when they say, 'God is love.' What manifest nonsense. And yet it happens to be true. Meanwhile there's this extraordinary face of yours." He leaned forward to look into it more closely. "As though one were looking into a crystal ball," he added incredulously. "Something new all the time. You can't imagine . . ."

But she could imagine. "Don't forget," she said, "I've been there myself."

"Did you look at people's faces?"

She nodded. "At my own in the glass. And of course at Dugald's. Goodness, that last time we took the moksha-medicine together! He started by looking like a hero out of some impossible mythology-of Indians in Iceland, of Vikings in Tibet. And then, without warning, he was Maitreya Buddha. Obviously, self-evidently Maitreya Buddha. Such a radiance! I can still see . . ."

She broke off, and suddenly Will found himself looking at Incarnate Bereavement with seven swords in her heart. Reading the signs of pain in the dark eyes, about the corners of the full-lipped mouth, he knew that the wound had been very nearly mortal and, with a pang in his own heart, that it was still open, still bleeding. He pressed her hands. There was nothing, of course, that one could say, no words, no consolations of philosophy-only this shared mystery of touch, only this communication from skin to skin of a flowing infinity.

"One slips back so easily," she said at last. "Much too easily. And much too often." She drew a deep breath and squared her shoulders.

Before his eyes the face, the whole body, underwent another change. There was strength enough, he could see, in that small frame to make head against any suffering; a will that would be more than a match for all the swords that fate might stab her with. Almost menacing in her determined serenity, a dark Circean goddess had taken the place of the Mater Dolorosa. Memories of that quiet voice talking so irresistibly about the swans and the cathedral, about the clouds and the smooth water, came rushing up. And as he remembered, the face before him seemed to glow with the consciousness of triumph. Power, intrinsic power-he saw the expression of it, he sensed its formidable presence and shrank away from it. "Who aw you?" he whispered.

She looked at him for a moment without speaking; then, gaily smiling, "Don't be so scared," she said. "I'm not the female mantis."

He smiled back at her-smiled back at a laughing girl with a weakness for kisses and the frankness to invite them.

"Thank the Lord!" he said, and the love which had shrunk away in fear came flowing back in a tide of happiness.

"Thank Him for what?"

"For having given you the grace of sensuality."

She smiled again. "So that cat's out of the bag."

"All that power," he said, "all that admirable, terrible will! You might have been Lucifer. But fortunately, providentially ..." He disengaged his right hand and with the tip of its stretched forefinger touched her lips. "The blessed gift of sensuality-it's been your salvation. Half'your salvation," he qualified, remembering the gruesomely loveless frenzies in the pink alcove, "one of your salvations. Because, of course, there's this other thing, this knowing who in fact you are." He was silent for a moment. "Mary with swords in her heart," he went on, "and Circe, and Ninon de Lenclos and now-who? Somebody like Juliana of Norwich or Catherine of Genoa. Are you really all these people?"

"Plus an idiot," she assured him. "Plus a rather worried and not very efficient mother. Plus a bit of the little prig and day-dreamer I was as a child. Plus, potentially, the old dying woman who looked out at me from the mirror the last time we took the moksha-medicme together. And then Dugald looked and saw what he would be like in another forty years. Less than a month later," she added, "he was dead."

One slips back too easily, one slips back too often . . . Half in mysterious darkness, half mysteriously glowing with golden light, her face had turned once again into a mask of suffering. Within their shadowy orbits the eyes, he could see, were closed. She had retreated into another time and was alone, somewhere else, with the swords and her open wound. Outside, the cocks were crowing again, and a second mynah bird had begun to call, half a tone higher than the first, for compassion.